Featured Speakers, Authors, and Guests
ĻӰ Military Writers’ Symposium
Featured Speakers, Authors, and Guests
The biographies of our distinguished featured speakers, authors, and guests appear below. We invite you to learn more about them.
Dr. Sandor Fabian is a former Hungarian Special Forces officer with 20 years of military experience. Dr. Fabian served in multiple national assignments including the senior Special Forces desk officer and advisor to the Hungarian Chief of Defense and held the Force Assessment and Evaluation Branch Head position at the NATO Special Operations Headquarters (now Allied Special Operations Command).
Dr. Fabian is currently the Deputy Regional Advisor for Europe and Africa at the DOD`s Irregular Warfare Center as a Morgan6 contractor and an instructor and curriculum developer at Leidos Inc. supporting the NATO Special Operations education, training, exercises, and evaluation efforts as a contractor. He is a graduate of the Hungarian Miklos Zrinyi National Defense University, holds a Master`s degree in Defense Analysis-Irregular Warfare from the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School, a graduate certificate in U.S. Intelligence Studies and a Ph.D. in Security Studies both from the University of Central Florida.
Dr. Fabian is the author of the book titled “Irregular Warfare: The Future Military Strategy For Small States” and published several articles in peer-reviewed journals including the Strategic Security Journal, the Defense and Security Analysis Journal, the Special Operations Journal, the Combating Terrorism Exchange Journal, the British Defence Studies journal and the Hungarian Sereg Szemle and Honvedsegi Szemle journals. Dr. Fabian has also contributed several articles at the Modern War Institute, the Irregular Warfare Initiative, the Small Wars Journal, and the British Royal United Service Institute. Dr. Fabian`s research interest includes irregular warfare, Russian and Chinese approaches to conflict, U.S. foreign security assistance and special operations.
Simon Shuster has reported on Russia and Ukraine for over 15 years, most of that time as a staff correspondent for TIME Magazine. Born in Moscow, he and his family came to the United States as refugees from the Soviet Union when he was six years old and settled in San Francisco.
After graduating from Stanford University in 2005, Simon returned to Moscow to work as a reporter for The Moscow Times, Reuters, the Associated Press and other publications. His political coverage of Russia's descent into authoritarianism included numerous profiles of Vladimir Putin and interviews with Dmitry Medvedev and other top Russian officials. He has also interviewed and profiled the last three presidents of Ukraine, starting with Viktor Yanukovych, whose violent overthrow in 2014 he covered from Independence Square in Kyiv.
That winter, Simon was the first foreign reporter to arrive in Crimea as it was occupied by Russian troops. Since then, he has spent years covering the war in Ukraine from both sides of the front lines. The year after the annexation of Crimea, Russian authorities deemed Simon a security threat and banned him from entering the country.
Simon first interviewed and profiled Volodymyr Zelensky in the spring of 2019, when the actor and comedian was in the middle of his longshot campaign for the presidency. Since Zelensky's election victory, Simon has been granted unparalleled access to his administration, his close friends, aides and staffers. He has traveled three times with President Zelensky to the front lines of the war in Ukraine and spent months reporting from inside the presidential compound in Kyiv as the Russian invasion unfolded.
He is the author of The Showman – Inside the Invasion That Shook the World and Made a Leader of Volodymyr Zelensky (January 2024). He is the 2025 William E. Colby Military Writers' Award winner.
Featured ĻӰ Faculty and Students
Oliver Groom was born in Scotland in 1997 of English and Scots parents, then moved with them to Lyons, New York, where he grew up. Groom developed an interest in history at a young age, and his final research project in his senior year of high school was the modern history of total war from the American Civil War into the twenty-first century. From 2015 to 2018, as an undergraduate student at Rogers State University in Claremore, Oklahoma, his passion for military history continued, and he was fortunate enough to study with ĻӰ’s own Dr. John Broom and Dr. David Ulbrich, among others. Groom's current research focuses on Britain’s historical experience of total war, particularly during the life and times of Winston Churchill. For his M.A. Thesis, which was completed in February 2025, Groom wrote about Churchill’s understanding of total war from his Victorian childhood to the end of the First World War and its significant impact on his eventual rise to power in May 1940 as Britain’s Prime Minister and Minister of Defense during the Second World War. He plans to continue his higher education as a Ph.D. candidate, potentially in the United Kingdom. He is the Dennis E. Showalter Research Fellow for this year's symposium.
Presentation Title:
Great Game, Great War: Winston Churchill’s Indirect Approach to Total War, 1914-1918
Jayden LaVecchia is a Junior from Post Falls, ID, pursuing a Bachelor's Degree in Studies and War and Peace with minors in Chinese, Information Warfare, and Intelligence and Crime Analysis. On campus, Jayden is actively involved with several activities, including the Corps of Cadets, Cyber Leader Development Program, NUARI, FCA, and the Democratic Resilience Center at Helmut Schmidt University. He is currently contracted with the Army, pursuing later work in Information Warfare and Narrative Security. His research analyzes patterns in historical information operations and establishes a new Cognitive Vulnerability framework and Heuristic Narrative Security program for cognitive security. He is a Richard S. Schultz '60 Symposium Fellow.
Dr. W. Travis Morris joined the faculty of ĻӰ in 2011. He teaches criminal justice in the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice and directs NU’s Peace and War Center. He teaches criminological courses in the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice and directs NU’s Peace and War Center. Morris holds a Bachelor of Arts in criminology from Northern Illinois University, a Master of Science in criminal justice from Eastern Kentucky University, and a doctorate from the University of Nebraska. He has published on information warfare and the relationship between policing, peacekeeping, counterterrorism, and counter-insurgency and is the author of the recent book, “Dark Ideas: How Violent Jihadi and Neo-Nazi Ideologues Have Shaped Modern Terrorism.” He has conducted ethnographic interviews in Yemen and published on how crime intersects with formal and informal justice systems in a socio-cultural context. His research interests include violent extremist propaganda analysis, information warfare, and text network analysis. He is an active teacher in and out of the classroom and has created a series of recent grant-funded student learning trips in the Balkans, Central Asia, and the Middle East.
R. Pierce Reid is a ĻӰ Alumni with a Masters in Military history. He began his career in marketing which led to working in psychological operations and military information operations. He served as a speaker and later MC of the ĻӰ InfoOps Symposium during the late '90's and early 2000's. He has published and consulted on Information Warfare since the early 2000's. He is currently retired from industry and defense and Chairs the Friends of The ĻӰ Military Writers Symposium and occasionally lectures on psychological warfare at ĻӰ.